You
have asked us to just write a few words about Leos Carax’s astonishing new film Holy Motors (2012). Ah, such cruelty,
dear Professor: a Surrealist parlour game? A chain letter, perhaps, written
across our one, shared, turning planet – and inked in our engulfing fever
dreams of ‘yesterday’s cinephilia today’? Is this still possible? What if this
ageing enfant terrible of
contemporary French cinema is demanding of his contemporaries (don’t be fooled
by his mirror-shade persona of nonchalant indifference!) that cinema must
dance, make music, speak to itself, speak to us in tongues (which it does, and
how!), and awaken us poor, working, Langian stiffs anchored in Henry Miller’s
Air-Conditioned Nightmare that life so often is, but does not have to be.

Quite
clearly, Carax, after thirteen years of wandering in the wasteland of
unfinished projects and missed opportunities, took Luis Buñuel’s advice: he
closed his eyes and dreamt this very daring manifesto of a cinema hovering
beyond the liminal horizons of multiplex orthodoxies. A cinema that reminds us,
from its very opening scenes, of Carax himself, discovering the ‘classical’ in situ truths and poetics of a medium
that, once upon a time, dared call itself CINEMA. And to hell with the witless
buffoons who parade themselves as cemetery auteurs craving for something a
little strange à la Diane Arbus!

Forget
the endless, apocalyptic saga of spotting the Russian-dolls-within-Russian
dolls film quotes, references and hints to cinema history; sure, great, for
those who can spot them, well and good as we sing along with Dino, ‘ain’t that
a kick?’ – but what about those among us who are ignorant? Is this untimely masterpiece something, perhaps,
to serve as a Japanese Pillow Book for future mutant cinephiles? Deep in my bones,
I believe so.

How
does one begin to sing the praises of Carax’s thunderclap of chameleon,
cinematic imaginings? Nietzsche once desired to have the honeycomb eyes of a
fly. Carax has such eyes, that effortlessly evoke Cocteau, Griffith, Murnau,
Lang, Welles, Renoir, Godard and Franju (ah, Édith Scob with a mask! How could
Carax get away with this?), among countless others, all forming a cabal of
sorts (above and below ground: including Max Ernst’s favourite creature, King
Kong) who dared to INVENT cinema.

For
that is precisely what Carax has done in spades with Holy Motors. Cinema has been reborn in this film: make no mistake
about it. When Orson Welles said that ‘the absence of limitation is the enemy
of art’, he must have had Monsieur Oscar/Denis Lavant/Carax himself in mind. Or
when Cocteau stated, ‘Film will only become an art when its materials are as
inexpensive as paper and pencil’ – yes, Carax again. And speaking of paper and
pencil: just add a box of matches, as Godard once did, and we will have cinema.

Cinema
that dares call itself by that name – this is what Carax has given us. When
Michel Piccoli steps into Monsieur Oscar’s white stretch limo and they speak of
‘the beauty of the act’ (beauté du geste)
that has driven (pardon the expression) them in their careers, and how cameras
today have significantly shrunken to the size of a doughnut or a wristwatch
(shades of Dick Tracy!), our heat skips a beat. For both of them are talking
about how cinema sheds its skin like a snake – it has been doing so since the
late nineteenth century. Only, something is lacking for these two, caught in
the hurly-burly whirlwind of technological change. Yet something also remains
in the twilight embers of their lives: a realisation that cinema is, for those
who care, ‘another good reason for living’ (Blaise Cendrars).

There
is a photo, circa 1967, of an elderly Michel Simon and a young Claude Berri
having a picnic together – quite a Renoirian scene in itself – that has haunted
me for years. They seem to have a fraternal understanding of the sheer, ontological
necessity to dream of an elsewhere, here and now. Carax is the kind of dreamer
who belongs in such company.

Yours
in friendship,

John Conomos

A First Look

Marey locomotion studies, animated > man (Leos Carax) on
bed with dozing dog in anodyne hotel room > ‘enchanted forest’ wallpaper
< Last Year at Marienbad starts
with camera moving down corridors with plant-form cornices < main
protagonist (Monsieur Oscar/Denis Lavant) will later say he ‘misses the forest’ > man finds keyhole, opens hidden door in wall
< Alice in Wonderland? > looks
down on motionless movie audience < mirroring of we, the movie audience >
with child walking down cinema gangway > girl < Alice? > behind the
thick glass of a ‘porthole’ > Oscar, le
banquier, says goodbye to his family (including little girl) at gate of
1930s functionalist house with porthole windows > enters stretch limo, which
will be his prop store-cum-changing room with makeup mirror > his driver,
Céline (Edith Scob, she of Les yeux sans
visage) < second stretch limo in 2012 cinema, after Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis > Oscar has dossier of
day’s tasks > first one disguised as crone-like beggar, la mendiante < Lon Chaney in Tod Browning’s The Unholy Three (1925) comes to mind; Chaney, ‘the man of a 1,000
faces’, as is Oscar with his silicone masks, contact lenses, wispy beards and
wigs < Fantômas, too? Or Zelig (aka l’homme caméléon)? > Oscar’s limo always seems to be taking a
long curve, almost going round in circles: ‘I’ll take a turn’, he says at one
point > second job: as acrobatic actor in motion-capture session < white
dots on black costume, as in Marey > are he and his red-clad, contorsionist
partner making a porno video game? An SF feature? < images-surprise / film-puzzle > limo’s number plate: 202 DXM 95 > next ‘part’: the crazed M. Merde, who
abducts model (Eva Mendes) in Père Lachaise fashion shoot < the film a paean to Paris as the site of
thanatoid, uncanny beauty; the city of the Surrealists < Surrealist artist Jean Benoît used to
eat roses and cigars > throwaway sequences, like the shuffling file of
refugee women in the sewer > the way the polyglot Oscar slots seamlessly
into the life of others; as the lumpen father of a melancholic teenage girl,
for example < can’t help thinking of the narrative swerves and deadpan
absurdities in Raúl Ruiz / late-period Buñuel / Alain Resnais > there’s an
upbeat, ‘irrelevant’ entr’acte with Oscar as l’accordéoniste > in the next segment he’s both le tueur and le tué (they’re twins), but Oscar (who is also them) walks away
unscathed < mendacious images,
miraculous reversals < what is a truthful lie? < elaborate mises en scène / playacting (but to what
purpose?) / shifts in genre (le
fantastique / noir / screwball
comedy / musicals) > Oscar is involved in scenifying the final moments of
others; imitating people in the throes of death (‘in at the kill’) > le mourant segment, again with a dozing
dog on the playacting moribund’s bed < I think of Alps (Giorgios Lanthimos, 2011) > the sumptuous, derelict Samaritaine
building (with its diorama built into the round handrail, I’ve read) as setting
for a musical quasi-finale: Kylie Minogue as Jean Seberg; her tragic chanson
refers to ‘the dream’ < Carax, at the beginning, is le rêveur > Oscar’s final ‘suburban’ avatar, and the site gag of
going home to a family of chimps < ‘it’s all in a day’s work’ > at end
Scob masks herself à la Les yeux sans
visage > final discoursing of cartoon-film-like talking limos in
overnight garage: they lament contemporary man’s indifference to machines (to
them) < at some point, insert of magician’s hands making a tour de passe-passe < the movie, an
accumulation of enigmas, of discontinuous continuities < recurring
father/uncle and daughter image: Carax dedicates his film to a (defunct?) young
woman (I didn’t catch her name) > in final credits Carax thanks Franju and
Henry James (why him?) < impossible for me to sum the film up: sumptuous but
hermetic? Forbidding? At all events, I couldn’t bring myself to go and see it
again, hence the tentative, errant scrappiness of these first notations in the
dark …

Paul Hammond

Action!
The Overture

And when I film this body on the move, I feel the same
pleasure I imagine
Muybridge felt watching his galloping horse.

– Carax

In
the Cannes press notes for Holy Motors,
Carax explicitly invokes the 19th-century chronophotographic
experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge as a vital historic
precedent for understanding his own ‘man of the cinema’ – Lavant/Oscar
– as he acts out and alternately embodies a series of pre-scripted ‘roles’ well
into the Parisian night. Carax’s comparison is not unexpected, for Holy Motors opens with one of Marey’s
musculature studies of a man in motion, while similar recreations of this
pre-cinematic inheritance are also glimpsed throughout. By way of the cinema’s
own technological ancestors, the overture of Holy Motors fuses our longstanding desire to animate the static
image – as a dreaming of the cinema, before the fact – with the
phenomenological lures of gesture, bodily comportment and kinesthetic action,
especially insofar as these function as the motor for events yet to come.

As Carax observes, like those ‘athletes chronophotographed
by Marey’, the sculpted physique of Lavant/Oscar is at the forefront of Holy Motors – oozing an insistent
physicality and an arresting sense of energy and presence across the wildly
disparate personas that make for a traversal of film history (beggar, monster,
gangster, lover). For Carax, as for myself watching Holy Motors, it is action – the elusive magic of a ‘body
on the move’ – that spurs the alchemical life-force of the cinema. Instead of
the bodily pleasures of Muybridge’s galloping horse, however, Carax concludes
with a scene of stretch limousines suddenly coming to life at the film’s close
– recounting to us their own existential exhaustion and possible extinction.

While action clearly animates the mechanical object
into life, liveliness and affective expressivity – like the overture, the
garage is another of Carax’s explicit figurations for the motorial power and
potency of the cinema – it is simultaneously tinged with the elegiac. As if all cinematic action is, once
enacted, in the process of ghosting; fading away, forgotten, added to the
stockpile of the past and oriented towards an uncertain future …

Saige Walton

Still Life

Holy Motors is a film about
movement, a fact consecrated in its very title.

But
what haunts me today in this film is stillness – in fact, one unnaturally frozen moment. When the sleeping man, played by
Carax, wakes and finds a secret door in the wall (a wall that flashes me back
to the birch forest of Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s
Childhood, 1962), the door opens out on to a movie theatre. In one shot, we
become the screen, and we look out into the audience. Mobile pools of light
reflect from the screen on to the crowd, but the audience itself is utterly
immobile, completely frozen.

In
his fascinating 1989 essay ‘Du défilement au défilé' (translated as ‘From
Movies to Moving’, ‘From Projector to Parade’ or ‘From Defilement to Filing
Past’), Serge Daney notes that, in order for the public to perceive moving
images, it had to be locked into place, made immobile, captured and fixed in a
state that Pascal Bonitzer called ‘blocked vision’. For Daney, the audience
needed just this ‘domestication’ in order to see and absorb the extraordinary
varieties of movement of which cinema was capable.

If
we were to track Daney’s notion through the history of modernist cinema, both
of extended duration (Antonioni, Akerman, Tarr) and of challenging density (Godard,
Makavejev, Marker), we could see, with particular clarity, the way this cinema
strongly encourages an attitude of intense and motionless concentration in the
spectator.

But
Daney goes further, by hazarding a hypothesis: that if the history of cinema
can be characterised by the gradual immobilisation of the spectator, we can
also see a recent reversal: viewers are becoming more mobile (think of TV’s
interrupted viewing), and images are becoming more immobile (for example,
cinema as a shop window, presenting commodities to attract a consumer
audience).

If
this is true, the still audience in Holy
Motors is two things. First, it is a throwback to the earlier, transfixed
audience in thrall to a rich, complex, demanding cinema. But second, it is also
us: a sisterhood and brotherhood of cinephiles (a word that could equally mean
‘lovers of movement’, if we recall its etymology) who express our cinephilia in movement, upon leaving the theatre:
through writing, reading, conversing and gathering into international
communities, like the one that has coalesced on this website in tribute to Holy Motors.

Girish Shambu

The Same Thing Behind the Scenes, As In Life

Holy Motors derives much of its power from the way that its overture and finale are placed
as its grand bookends. Each act in between is its own beautiful piece –
self-contained, almost solipsistic – but works best when slotted into place. As
it opens, Carax himself wakes from slumber and an oceanic expanse of sound
surrounds him, a soundscape reminiscent of Paris and its busy metropolitan
streets, but with calming seagulls and lapping water redolent of the seaside.
So, although Holy Motors opens in
darkness, in a claustrophobic space, it does not define itself, or close itself
off to anything. And it follows: Carax is not here to tell us a story, to make
us follow a straight path or head down a narrative one-way street. Instead he
drives us all over Paris, through different worlds and characters,
inexhaustibly boundless.

As Carax walks around his room, he
passes a gloomy forest painted on the walls – a thickness of slender, bare
trees that extend into the two-dimensional distance. Its ghostly mist is at
once daunting and enticing. He opens a door in the forest wall and walks
through it, immediately entering a movie theatre – it is another kind of
darkness, another forest perhaps, where an audience sits and is intrigued by a
series of images emanating from elsewhere. Later, as Lavant/Oscar is sitting in
a limousine being driven around Paris by Céline (Édith Scob), he tells her that
he misses the forest. He has not had an appointment there for a while – but
what exactly does he miss? Perhaps, speaking for Carax, he misses the cinema’s
powerful mystique, its ability to invite him into the unknown and surprise him.

In Pola X, Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) is tempted by the forest,
losing his way before his life completely changes direction. For Pierre, the
forest serves as a gateway into a new state of being, beyond the stasis of
family and responsibility. These two forests – dark, endless, unnavigable – could
almost be the same space. In Holy Motors:
beyond the forest painted on a wall is a cinema; this is a portal to a world of
possibilities that the somnambulist spectators do not appreciate. It is more
than obvious that the film is a most wonderful celebration of the glory of
cinema, while also being a requiem for its demise. Monsieur Oscar laments: ‘Sometimes
I, too, find it hard to believe in it all’. And still Carax makes it happen,
and we believe it. If we do not believe that what we see in front of us is
real, at least we know that it really belongs to the cinema, to its geniuses
and champions – and that is just as important.

One of my favourite moments in Holy Motors occurs when Céline is
escorting Monsieur Oscar to his final appointment. He hums the lyrics to ‘My
Way,’ the song defiantly immortalised by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Sid
Vicious with an undeniable slant of anarchism. The end is here, so now we face
the final curtain. For a brief time, Céline sings along, her mouth shaping to
form the song’s words, but making no sound. This brief moment expresses Carax’s
impossibly chasmic beliefs regarding our involvement in the cinema: we are
reaching the end, and are such slaves to it that we will go along with it,
powerless – we, too, are subconsciously mouthing the words to a song. The end
of Monsieur Oscar’s day, the end of Holy Motors,
the end of cameras that were bigger than we are – and the end of something more
intangible than all those things put together.

For his last appointment, Monsieur
Oscar must return home to his ‘family’. His appointment portfolio directs him
to a house, a wife, his children; when he gets there, Carax opens up a joke
that we never realised we were in on. It’s like Nagisa Oshima does in Max, mon amour (1986), when Charlotte
Rampling’s Margaret has an affair with Max, a chimpanzee. ‘It’s always fascinating
to watch monkeys – it’s like catching sight of your own past in a mirror’, says
Margaret’s husband Peter (Anthony Higgins), trying to accept Max as part of
their lives. The interlacing of both these Parisian lives with humankind’s
evolutionary and symbolic ancestors ties them all together, and leaves Holy Motors in a much more ambiguous
position than it might otherwise seem. Evolution is only part of life, an
ineluctable journey that projects constantly forwards, with the occasional default
back to the past. We are living the same thing, over and over, changing with
the times but still failing to realise the process. All moments are necessary.
The world, our lives, travel in and out of spaces, emotions, pathways – through
forests, oceans, and cities. When Carax walks into the cinema at the film’s
beginning, there is a glowing neon sign SORTIE, leading to the exit. We can
leave if we want. By the end, that option has gone. There is no exit left.

Eloise Ross

An Opening

I. In an
early scene of Inland Empire (David
Lynch, 2006), the character played by Krzysztof Majchrzak stubbornly repeats:
‘I need an opening’. His attitude captures well my own attitude when confronted
with works like Lynch’s, or Holy Motors.
Films that declare they are reluctant to be interpreted but that,
simultaneously, we cannot help but interpret – since they are full of
possibilities that encourage us to do so. These are the films that exceed us. Their multiplicity is the sure
sign of this – and perhaps that is exactly where their greatness lies. However,
these are works that demand, even more fervently, that we gain entry to them
from a small, intimate corner. And, if we can find that spot – that opening –
then probably everything that the film is,
or can be, will vanish before the
experience, unique and secret, that this work gives us, and that we can give to
it. All this explains why, in a film like Holy
Motors – which is so full of sublime moments – it is the opening sequence that
obsesses me the most.

Carax himself has remarked (in an interview with
Eulàlia Iglesias in the November 2012 issue of Caiman) that it was Katerina Golubeva who gave him a short
story by E.T.A. Hoffmann to read; a story ‘in which the leading character
discovers that his hotel room leads, through a secret door, to an opera
theatre’. The story in question is 'Don Juan',
and what Carax does not say in the interview is that the relationship between
Hoffmann’s work and the opening sequence of his film is much deeper than this
simple detail lets on. The principal character of ‘Don Juan’ is a traveller
who, in the middle of the night, wakes up in his hotel room: a cry that
announces the beginning of some celebration has disturbed his sleep. Strangely,
he calls the waiter who informs him that his room connects, via a hidden door,
to a passageway leading to a theatre balcony. On this very night, Mozart’s
opera Don Giovanni is being performed
– so the waiter invites him to pass through the door and witness the event from
seat number 23, reserved for distinguished guests.

Hoffmann’s tale is divided into
three quite distinct parts. In the first of these, we encounter a detailed
description of the emotions experienced by the hero as he observes what might
be described as an ideal representation of Mozart’s opera: faithful to the spirit and to the original language of the
work, musically sublime, and featuring a group of performers who fully embody
their roles. During the performance, the hero feels a strange presence behind
him; but he decides to ignore it and goes on, immersed in the pleasure that the
opera gives him. However, at intermission (the entr’acte), something extraordinary happens: we discover that,
during Act I, the actress playing Doña Ana has been, at once, both in the
spectator box and on the stage. Speaking with her, the hero feels, for the
first time in his life, that he is truly uncovering the work’s secrets. It is
only then that the reader realises – also for the first time – that this traveler, of whom we know so little, is also himself a composer.

The second part of ‘Don Juan’
takes the form of a letter penned by the hero who, overwhelmed by the
experience he has just been through, retires to a solitary spot and, by the
light of twin candles, writes to his friend Teodoro. This letter is an interpretation of the essence of
Mozart's work, of the profound intuition that our hero believes himself to have
experienced, thanks to that ideal representation. When 2am arrives, the
traveler ends his letter, and feels suddenly intoxicated by the scent of Doña
Ana’s perfume. The third and final part of the story takes place a day later
and offers a short Appendix in the form of a conversation, where we discover
that the singer has died the previous night, at exactly 2am.

Doubtless, we can view the hero of
this tale as an alter ego of its author (Hoffmann himself was a composer and
music critic; before writing this story, he had studied Mozart – for whom he
felt a genuine passion – and had attended various performances of Don Giovanni in German). The fact that
only the hero of the tale appreciates a representation that the rest of the
audience rated negatively, suggests that Hoffmann saw himself as the ideal –
and perhaps sole – spectator capable of grasping the ultimate meaning of a work
that is beyond everyone else. Hence the personal interpretation he makes of the
opera, far from the general idea that the majority audience would form. (For
more on the Hoffmann/’Don Juan’ relation, see Ricarda Schmidt, ‘How to Get Past
Your Editor: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Don Juan” as a Palimpsest’, in R. Langford
[ed.], Textual Intersections: Literature,
History and the Arts in Nineteenth Century Europe, Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2009).

II.Holy Motors’
first sequence opens on a shot that lasts a bit more than half a minute. In it,
we see a packed movie theatre – but the audience is asleep, or with its eyes
closed. On the soundtrack we hear street noises, a door that opens and, after a
brief silence, the terrified voice of a man who shouts three times: ‘No!’ Then,
the noise of a gunshot, the flash of which momentarily illuminates the
spectators’ faces. But they do not seem to feel anything at all: they remain in
a frightening state of immobility, as if they are statues. On an upper level,
there is a man (Carax), who has awoken in the middle of the night in his hotel
room. He lights a cigarette, illuminates the room and dons his dark glasses.
Film sounds are clearly heard in his room, and he begins to move in their
direction, trying to figure out where they are coming from. He stops against a
wall that is covered with wallpaper simulating a forest full of bare, thin
trees. The man inspects the wall and discovers a lock. His ring finger is
attached, as if by prosthesis, to a key that unlocks this door. Then he pushes
hard against the door, breaking open an entry. He passes through a corridor
lined with red walls – followed by his faithful dog. An emergency exit light
flashes in front of him. He opens a second door, climbs a set of stairs, and
emerges in the empty amphitheatre section of a cinema. From there, he looks at
the spectators in the audience. A child and a dog slowly moving down the aisle
seem to be the only visible signs of life.

This sequence of Holy Motors presents a situation that is
quite similar to Hoffmann’s ‘Don Juan’, but subject to small, critical
variations: the theatre has become a cinema, and the person who crosses the
threshold is not a privileged spectator, but the director himself. Even though
we never see the images projected onto the screen, we know that it is Carax’s
film because the sounds we hear (lapping waves, birds, a horn) are stretched
out to cover the beginning of the next scene – the first in which Lavant
appears. However, in the opening sequence, the emphasis is not on the
representation (as it will be for the rest of the film), but the spectators.
From his elevated position, Carax takes in an audience that appears totally
inert. It is a truly terrifying image: a mass that is motionless, inexpressive,
devoid of any emotion. Hoffmann’s dream of an ideal representation has here
been transformed into nightmare, and the romantic communion between spectator
and artwork that was at the heart of the original tale has been replaced by the mise en scène of an amputated
exchange.

As in Hoffmann’s story, with the
actress who plays Doña Ana, in Holy
Motors the only moment in which we witness the life of Mr Oscar beyond the various characters he plays is
in the ‘intermission’. But, before we figure this out, how many times do we
imagine that we are seeing his real life?
Carax has not only made a film about the beauty of gesture; he has made a film
in which the beauty of that gesture is equivalent to its truth. This is the
fundamental emotion that Holy Motors stirs in us. Just like in ‘Don Juan’, the link here between actor and character
is absolute: the wrenching suicide, the irreversibility of death, the intensity
of the father-daughter relationship, the shed tears … If all this moves us, it
is because of the burden of truth it carries. Carax has, in effect, made a film
on the beauty of gesture, and has delegated to Lavant the task of driving it,
gloriously. But he has also filmed the awful, terrifying reverse shot. And, in
a moving gesture of honesty, he decided that he should himself be the star of
this opening sequence. For, after all this exertion, irrational and
disproportionate, in pursuit of beauty, how can he avoid the fear that there
will be nobody to watch it?

Carax, romantic film director par excellence, has dedicated his film
to Katerina Golubeva, and declared (in the Caiman interview): ‘We make the films for the dead, but we show them to the living’ –
a sign of his profoundly Garrelian side. Like Inland Empire, Holy Motors is a film that functions as a passage between two universes. A film on cinema
as a vehicle of transport; and on the spectator as an essential part of this
mechanism. After all, Carax gets to superimpose the green letters of his film’s
title on the bodies of those zombiefied viewers: a gesture at once both ironic
and hopeful.

Cristina Álvarez López

(translated
from the Spanish by Adrian Martin)

Premise

In
cinema, a narrative premise is usually something that you like (or not) for its
ability to get everything else in a film moving. It is (at best) the seed, the
matrix, the germ of an idea. But it is not the film. In Holy Motors, by contrast, the premise, all by itself, provides
endless fuel for wondering and speculating and figuring. Carax may well have
arrived at it through a David Lynch-style (day)dreaming or free association;
however it came about, it ended up gaining an hallucinatory hyper-logic that is
unique in cinema.

It
resembles Raúl Ruiz’s oft-played twist on the Groundhog Day (1993) idea, in his films including The Blind Owl (1987) and Three Lives and Only One Death (1996):
you will live an infinity of lives, of parallel stories and worlds, all in one
momentous day – but then you are condemned to live that very same, accursed day
all over again, for every day of your life. Wonder and surprise thus do the
Moebius Strip into misery and banality: it is the perfect Ruizian
equation/dialectic of Mystery and Ministry, one always, eventually, giving
birth to the other. Or, in Holy Motors’
terms, and its magnificent final song by Gérard Manset: to live will always be
to relive.

The
fictional premise is beautifully minimal and elusive. We gather that Mr Oscar
is performing, always performing. We listen to a discussion about small digital
cameras, and thus deduce that there is filming, and some sort of edited projection
or live broadcasting going on (the EDtv [1999] or The Truman Show [1998]
idea) – a Reality Show extravaganza of some kind. We assume there are
spectators for this show – those transfixed creatures discovered by Carax in
the prologue, maybe? (Shades here of Paul Bartel’s 1968 The Secret Cinema, remade in 1986 for TV’s Amazing Stories.) But no cameras, edit suites or audiences are ever
shown to us. In our placid state (it is an oddly quiet, calm, non-hysterical
film), we never even look for them; this is not a Haneke-style mind-game of
impossible, hidden camera-positions, as in Caché (2005). Those cameras constitute the invisible outside to the story – like,
again, the occult (and occulted) Mabuse-style controllers behind many a Ruiz
tale, or the scientific surveillance teams at each further-out ring of the
narrative situation in a J.G. Ballard short story. The one place where Oscar
could be perfectly easily surveilled and recorded – inside the techno-limousine
– appears, paradoxically, to be the one haven where he is not performing, or
being seen (and this is what creates the tender, intimate, private bond with
his driver – who, in a striking inversion of normal logic, putson a mask to return
to her own real life!). But then, how does the mysterious, sinister Mr Big
figure of Michel Piccoli get in and out of this limo?

If
you’ve ever wondered what an anamorphic
fold is in film narrative, here it is: Mr Oscar begins by farewelling his
family. Ordinary family, ordinary scene. Near the end of the film, the
chauffeur gives him his dossier for the final appointment of the night: another
family, a new family – with the identities of its members almost cornily hidden
from us by an obvious sleight-of-hand in the shot. When we reach that family –
the perfectly blissful nuclear family unit of monkeys – we realise that the
first, seemingly real, personal and biological family of Oscar was not that at
all, that each night he beds down with a different wife (animal or human, no
matter) and in the morning bids adieu to new kids. The initial scene of
commonplace human/social intercourse unfolds, at the end, its monstrous – or
rather, indifferent – truth, its exposed double: every father is a fake, and
every family is a let’s-pretend simulation (by anyone at all, whatever their
species), a hollow shell. Suddenly – for the first time in a long time, and far
better than in Zizek – we understand again what ideology is and how it
interpellates us all.

But
hang on. It could be, according to the open logic allowed by the film, that one
of these families – one or the other, human or animal – could indeed be ‘his’.
(A kid in the opening, after all, gleefully exhorts his Dad to ‘work hard’.)
This equivocation sets up many delicious ambiguities in the film – and it is
fascinating to gauge, in reviews and conversations, how keen viewers are to
pinpoint the ‘real’ moments of Oscar’s existence. So, some assume that the
scene with the teenage girl is an authentic family scene (even though Oscar
wears a wig for it, as he dresses in costume for everything!). What about the
seemingly spontaneous moment when our strange hero spots ‘himself’ as the
banker, goes berserk and tries to kill him(self), terrorist-style? And the
sublime accordion ‘intermission’ in Saint-Merri Church – is this really a
moment ‘off’, or only ever ‘on’?

We
must then begin to question the status of every other character we see,
according to this logic: we come to know that the woman with whom he plays the
‘dying old man’ scene is another actor in the generalised spectacle-game, with
her own ledger of appointments. But what of the teenage girl? Eva Mendes? Kylie
Minogue/Eva/Jean too, is an avowed player, being chauffeured in a mirroring
limousine – and might that not mean that, when she falls (unseen and unheard)
to her death, she is just faking, part of yet another elaborate mise en scène? Oscar himself, after all,
seemingly dies and resurrects two or three times (the number is fuzzy because,
in the meantime, he splits into two characters in the shady warehouse scene, just
as he does in the banker-attack – and which one of him, exactly, stumbles out
of that warehouse?) – thanks to the marvellous ellipse-cuts that literally pick
him up and send him on his way to the next scene, the next appointment.

And
don’t forget the cars, those ‘holy motors’. They start yapping in the finale,
but that must mean, retroactively, they have been sentient beings for the whole movie! Remember, two limos crash
to initiate the reunion of Oscar and Eva … Cars, by the way, are having a truly
remarkable time in the movies of 2012. At the start of Cronenberg’s curious Cosmopolis – which could almost be
spliced to the end of Holy Motors –
the affectless hero actually wonders, after a loving tracking shot along a line
of limos, where the cars go at night and what they do. And in João Pedro
Rodrigues’ short Morning ofSaint Anthony’s Day, another line of (more ordinary) automobiles
comes loudly to life whenever a zombie-like survivor of the night-before merely
floats by. Animism is a contagious force in contemporary cinema …

Adrian Martin

Image-Circuits

Every
film organises circulations of images: but to orchestrate these circulations in circuits, to think their variety, to
work their junctions, eurhythmics, and short-circuits – to convey their differential,
opposing and indeed disparate energies – constitutes the beginning of a poetics
in the formal sense of the word: an art of the assembly line. The history of
French cinema is punctuated by masterpieces that are poetic in a dual sense:
both structural and enchanting. Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), the first and most experimental of the
great city symphonies, is the direct ancestor of Holy Motors: a journey-critique, twenty-four hours in Paris, which
begins by deploying the plastic arsenal cinema has at its disposal for
destroying bourgeois clichés, then sets out in search of the most exciting,
kinetic situations (carnival, dance hall, embrace, gestures of work …), and
culminates in the moment where the 35mm film self-destructs, as proof of the
violent death of the protagonist – just like, nearly a century later, the way
the mass of pixels collapses in on itself at Père Lachaise in Holy Motors.

Between
these twin tracts, in 1950, Jean Genet’s Un
chant d’amour devotes itself to the representation of psychological images,
inventing an economy that avoids exchange in order to develop other types of
traffic. A voyeuristic warden, a lecherous old prisoner, a frustrated young
prisoner, a population of captives in their cells transformed into reliquaries
of desire; spurts of looks, of beatings and, above all, of fantasies: prison
liberates the images. Un chant d’amour weaves three figurative regimes: realistic approximation (the prison
filmed/treated in gestures and fragments/sections/pieces); fantasy as the
gearshift/transmission of scenarios (the linear, rustic reverie of the
prisoner); fantasy as fetishisation of a phenomenon (the fragmentary, erotic
visions of the warden). Thanks to this heterogeneity, the masculine body
multiplies its modes of appearance; it occurs sometimesin beautiful form and sometimes in prosaic
physiology, in verist bas-relief or dreamlike silhouette. But these three
regimes (realistic construction, idyllic fancy and colossal fixation) –
apparently hermetic and opposed – more secretly capture, divert and infiltrate
each other, entangling themselves and causing narrative short-circuits.

By
abolishing all usual distinctions between psyches, between the one and the
many, between the fragment and the totality, the underground economy that
structures the desiring fury of Un chant
d’amour prefigures a definition of the human being given in a short text by
Genet from 1967, the magnificent title of which refers to the destiny of the
stereotypes depicted in Cavalcanti’s film: ‘What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn
into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet’. Triggered by the mystery
of a blank look in the enclosed space of a railway car, Genet’s text summarises
the dramaturgical protocol of Holy Motors:

In the world there exists, and
there has only ever existed, one man.
He is in each of us in entirety; thus he is ourselves. Each is the other and
all others. Except that a phenomenon, for which I do not even know the name,
seems to infinitely dividethis single man,
splits him into the accidents of appearance, and renders each of the fragments
foreign to ourselves.

Nicole Brenez

(translated
from French by Felicity Chaplin;
originally appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 682, October 2012, p. 84.
Reprinted with the
author’s permission)

Faces Are
Masks Anyway

1. ‘Faces are masks anyway’, wrote
Cornell Woolrich in Deadline at Dawn (1944).

2. There is a lot of talk today
about ‘stolen identities’, but is there really anything to steal, beyond the
paperwork?

3. There is nothing remarkable per se about an actor playing many parts
in a film; Buster Keaton, Alec Guinness and Tony Randall are all precedents
that must have inspired Carax and Lavant.

3. Is Holy Motors really considered ‘difficult’? For anyone who has a
sense of our culture, wherein each individual self has, at every moment, to be
laid out on a platter ready for imminent media-consumption, there are so many
emotional and intellectual entry points into the film. As for the film's
‘meaning’, Carax has been so beautifully articulate about his intentions, there
is little more to add.

4. What might be difficult about Holy Motors is to accept the thought
that Carax might finally have been able to shoot a feature only because of the
general 1980s revival in popular culture.

5. Carax is the great filmmaker of
exhaustion. From the outset, his concern has been to counteract the forces that
produce blockages in bodies and that wind down the world's machinery – his
characters and their milieux have always veered between the poles of frozen and
exaggerated movement.

In Holy Motors this problem is treated in the context of today's
CGI-driven cinema, hence its nostalgic tone. As Carax says: ‘The film is a form
of science fiction, in which humans, beasts and machines are on the verge of
extinction – “sacred motors” linked together by a common fate and solidarity,
slaves to an increasingly virtual world’.

This is most evident in the motion
capture segment. At first it recalls the ‘Modern Love’ sequence in Mauvais sang (1986), wherein Alex is
saved from petrification by the ‘movement of world’ that carries him along when
he can no longer propel himself; his body and the world are simultaneously
re-ignited so that we, too, can know (along with Judy Garland in Meet Me in St Louis, 1944) ‘how it feels
when the universe reels’. In Holy Motors'
replay of the ‘Modern Love’ sequence, Lavant is on a treadmill, out of breath,
gamely running on the spot but without producing any real movement, the green
screen behind him merely providing a pathetic simulation of the movement of
world – there is no longer a passage to the ecstatic transcendence to which the
sequence led in the earlier film. The un-earthly speed of the dispositif sends Lavant tumbling to the
ground.

6. ‘After all, can we really use
technicist terms to describe camera movements in animated or CGI films that
have become metaphorical? In a live-action film it sort of makes sense to talk
of a tracking shot, because that was what was used to achieve the movement we
observe. But in a CGI-driven film, where the whole visual enactment was
computer-generated, it might look like a tracking shot to us as we view it, but
has nothing to do with a tracking shot in actuality. Can we still use film
language that has become metaphorical – where a shot is like a tracking shot?’ (Tony McKibbin)

7. The contemporary film that Holy Motors seems, above all others, to
be in dialogue with, is the criminally underrated Mister Lonely (2007) by Harmony Korine.

8. The delicious moment late in
the film when the fake starry sky from Boy
Meets Girl (1984) seems to reappear in the overhead shot of the Limo. Until
you realise that it has been there all along, since the moment it clung to the
suit Lavant donned for the motion capture sequence.

9.
Carax has often been termed a Mannerist filmmaker, for taking cinema history
rather than life as his source of reference. It is partly true, and Holy Motors continues to explore the
Mannerist aesthetic. The Mannerist Carax does not just reference Marey, Franju,
Demy and so on; he must re-work their images and stagings. In this, Carax is
like a musician sampling another’s song, but creating something entirely new
from a mere detail in the original. Therefore, he is not fatalistically
pointing to a crisis, to the exhaustion of new cinematic forms in our Dantesque
CGI hell, but offering a highly creative response to it. ‘Pour la beauté du
geste’. Et du mouvement.

Fergus Daly

Mixed Pairs

1.

In
the middle of an abandoned, half-built shopping mall, a man sits fishing.
Around him, the bones of the building sit exposed to the elements, weathering,
wasting, an empire decaying pre-emptively. He won’t catch any fish.

In
an abandoned department store, a man meets a woman he used to know. Remnants
from that past era – is it our era? – litter the set, sunk in dust and cobwebs
like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake.

2.

An
orchestra of deranged accordionists screech through a labyrinthine set of stone
passageways, lurching toward the camera and passing and coming round again in a
ferocious wheeze. The emotional intensity of the original blues takes a
physical turn, as the squeeze boxes gasp to keep up with the fire of notes.

A
magnificent water dragon frolics in a skyrise water tower. Or rather, he is
part man, part dragon, unmistakably a man dressed up as a dragon. Narrative is
suspended. The man performs dragon and croons a song of love and forgetting.

3.

Can
a man in a coma have an erection? It’s a thought that doesn’t worry one devoted
mother. As her son lies unconscious, she jerks him off in a frantic gesture of
incestuous compassion.

Merde
is happy. He has a beautiful model to play with. His powerful bent erection
springs forth, and like a child or a kitten, he rests his head in her lap.

4.

A
man wakes up in a room lined with intricate forest wallpaper. He feels his way
across the forest. There is a door. He passes through into a huge old cinema
filled with sleeping people. The screen lights their faces. Are they dreaming
the same dream?

A
woman, bent-backed, climbs with excruciating slowness, up the stairs of an
empty cinema. Her walking stick clicks against the concrete. Click. Click.
Click. Click.